


Vampirism as a Treatment for Congenital Conditions

by alienchangeling



Category: Luminosity, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Applying Science to Twilight, F/F, Metafanfiction, Vampires, Witches, vampire biology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-21
Updated: 2014-07-18
Packaged: 2018-02-05 15:58:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1824091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alienchangeling/pseuds/alienchangeling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Meg met an attractive if awkward stranger in a bar, "vampire" was so far down her list of hypotheses she wouldn't have even assigned it a probability.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Luminosity](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/56998) by Alicorn. 



> This is metafanfiction of Alicorn's Luminosity and Radiance (http://luminous.elcenia.com/), which in turn is fanfiction of Twilight with a rationalist twist and was inspired by Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality.

I leaned over to Jess and hissed, “She’s been _staring_ at me for the last thirty minutes. She’s trying to look like she hasn’t by looking away, like she is now, but she _has_. It’s bugging me.” 

Jess looked amused, tucked a strand of sun-highlighted brown hair behind her ear, and sipped her beer. “We come to Mississippi Studios because it’s a queer woman’s hangout. She’s looking at you because you’re pretty, Meg. What exactly bothers you about that? I thought you were looking for a girlfriend.” 

I half-grimaced, partly because I didn’t know. She wasn’t bad looking, quite the opposite. She was beautiful, stunning, even in a t-shirt and jeans, even looking so tired. I could believe she was a model. I wanted to believe, but couldn’t, that she was on drugs and that explained why she was so sickly-pale. Her skin was albinistic, no melanin at all—maybe she was an albino. No, there was something wrong about her, something that put me in mind of of the uncanny valley. I didn’t see any of the pink undertones from hemoglobin that everyone had to have, the only indications of blood in her body were the deep shadows under her eyes. Maybe it was the lighting, but at the same time, her hair was a normal dark gold, which didn’t fit with albinism. Could she have dyed it? I couldn’t reason away the cold chill she provoked or even explain why she provoked it. I didn’t _like_ not knowing what was going on in my own head, and that was as good a reason as any to want her gone. I didn’t think Jess would see it that way, though, so I made up an excuse for her. “It’s creepy that she’s just watching me. This isn’t middle school, you don’t express affection by staring at someone and hoping they’ll read your mind. If she’s interested in me, she should come over here and talk to me.” 

“Maybe she’s shy. You _could_ talk to her?” 

The woman was standing next to me. I blinked, wondering when that happened, how she’d manage to cross the room to our table without my noticing—I prided myself on being observant. Almost like she’d heard what I’d said despite the ambient noise, she said, “Hi. I’m Iris. Could I buy you a drink?” 

She really was pretty. She had one of those small noses with a slight inward curve, and the rest of her face was also soft-edged. Her eyebrows proved her hair color was natural, but it was strange that her eyes were the same gold hue. That ruled out albinism unless—colored contacts? With her standing next to me, I flushed guiltily at my earlier reaction. Whatever else was true, she had to have some genetic disorder, and it would be rude to hold that against her. Jess kicked me under the table, and I realized I was now the one staring. I looked down at my wine—it was almost empty. “I’m Meg. Sure?” 

She smiled at me—I’d never had someone so striking smile only at me, and it did funny things to my stomach—and took a seat at our table. Her coloring was still impossibly bloodless. I tried to remember if gold was even a color that human eyes could be. I didn’t think so, but I didn’t want to dig out my iPhone and check while she was sitting next to me. Could she be wearing contacts? I didn’t see any. Could a genetic disorder make someone’s eyes gold? Other species of mammals had golden eyes, and I guessed humans probably could too with the right genetic variation, so maybe that was it. I did like that she was as tall as I was. Jess introduced herself, and Iris bought me a glass of wine and another beer for Jess, but only took water for herself. 

Iris seemed content to watch me without speaking, but the last thing in the world I wanted was to stare back at her and catalog all the ways she seemed off, so I asked her almost the most neutral possible question. “What do you do for a living, Iris? I teach math at a private high school.” 

Iris smiled again. She had dimples. “Oh, you studied math? I always enjoy meeting other women with an appreciation for the subject—not that I’m an academic mathematician, but I’ve picked up some higher mathematics for my job.” She paused. “I—kind of—run an investment fund. These days, that requires a lot of number crunching. Your job’s probably more rewarding than mine.” 

Wasn’t she a little young for that much responsibility? She couldn’t be much older than me. Her hesitant response told me I’d chosen the wrong question, so I tried to recover. “You have to make better money than I do, and working with kids isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Not to criticize my kids, most of them are nice enough for teenagers who all get cars for their sixteenth birthdays, but I feel like I’m a Victorian governess hired to take care of my betters’ children. They and their parents remind me of everything I’m not.” I winced inwardly when I saw she could take what I’d said as an indictment of her. Feeling incredibly smooth, I hurried on. “Anyway, I don’t mean to give the wrong impression—I’m not a mathematician, I never made it past multivariable calculus except for a class I took on logic. I was a philosophy and biology double major, technically, but more like philosophy and premed in reality.” I hoped that didn’t sound puffed up. “I would have just done a philosophy major, but my parents demanded I major in something useful. Like you’d expect, I didn’t have a social life in college.” 

“Philosophy too? It’s a fascinating subject, but like you, I had to find another field to make a career in. I admit, I was interested in the more mathematical areas of philosophy, where it touches on linguistics and logic. Did you not want to be a doctor?” Her voice sounded strange, too, pure and tuned like an instrument. At least it was a pleasant kind of strange, though. 

“I wanted to be a bioethicist, but after a certain point I couldn’t justify taking on more student debt and didn’t finish medical school. That’s how I ended up teaching high school.” That was not the whole story, not even half of it, but the whole story wasn’t a topic for the first time meeting someone. 

Iris hadn’t looked at Jess once in the entire time that she’d sat at our table. That was weird, too, because Jess, with her muscles, athletic figure, and clean-cut features, was better-looking than me. I glanced at her and she coughed, probably sensing I wanted a conversational redirect before I stuck my foot in my mouth again, and said, “I cook for a vegetarian restaurant, Greens. Definitely not as intellectual as what you or Meg do, Iris.” 

I thought Iris could tell I was feeling awkward because she said, “I don’t want to be the third wheel here by stealing your friend, Jess. Would you agree to see me again, Meg? Please?” 

Jess kicked me under the table again. I decided I couldn’t turn her down based on a weird feeling I couldn’t even identify, so I said, “Okay. Where do you want to go?” 

“Do you like movies, music, the theater…” 

“How about coffee?” 

Iris made a face, lovely even doing that. “I have weird food allergies, I can’t drink coffee, but I can find something more palatable. Tomorrow?” I frowned. “Next week? Next Friday? Six? Jazzkat’s Coffee Bar?” 

“Okay.” 

Iris left, with one last lingering look at me, and Jess said, “She’s _gorgeous_ and probably loaded too, even if she is a bit awkward. It won’t hurt you to go on a date with her. _One_ date.” 

I moaned. “Did you hear me back there? I managed to ask a rude question and insult her in the space of five minutes.” 

“She still asked you out. Give her, and yourself, a chance—maybe you’ll make an adorably awkward couple.” 

I tried to sound as ungrateful as possible. “Thanks.” 

We spent another thirty minutes finishing our alcohol before heading back. The moment we got home, I did some research on human eye colors. I was right, the closest natural eye color to Iris’s was amber, and hers didn’t look like any of the pictures of amber eyes I could find on Google Images. Hers reminded me of a wolf’s more than anything else. Why was a woman with wolf eyes so interested in me? I was curious despite myself, and that was a good enough reason to show up for our date. 

I didn’t have time to dress up since I had to come straight from a teacher’s meeting after school, so I was still wearing my slacks and blouse. When I arrived at the cafe, Iris insisted on buying me a latte, only getting water for herself. She had on jeans again, but her bias-cut top was dressier than the t-shirt she’d worn at the bar. Her eyes seemed like they were a brighter gold, but maybe it was the different lighting. When we sat down, she said, “I get the feeling that you don’t like me. What could I do to get on your good side?” 

“I don’t dislike you.” I was uncomfortable around her, which she could read as dislike, though. “I’m neutral. Maybe it would help if I got to know you a little better?” 

“From the brief conversation we had last week, you seemed starved for intellectual stimulation. Would you enjoy talking some philosophy?” 

I almost chuckled but stopped myself in time. It wasn’t the smoothest line I’d ever heard, though at least she was direct. “Okay, sure. You said something about the philosophy of mathematics the other night? Where’d you go to school? How does a philosophy grad end up as a hedge fund manager?” 

“I got my B.A. and doctorate in philosophy from Harvard.” She said it casually, without emphasis, which raised her in my estimation. “My thesis was on some of the ideas in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, with some references to Frege and Russell, though my opinions have evolved since then. After I graduated, I couldn’t find an academic job, so I had to find another way of supporting myself.” 

“What did you think then, and what do you think now?” 

Iris was the real deal. The philosophy of language and mathematics sorted out poseurs, most of whom preferred accessible topics like ethics that they thought were intuitive, but Iris had read more and thought deeper than I had. She also knew the work of living, active philosophers. The more we talked, the more impressed I was. We wandered out of the philosophy of language to linguistics proper, and she gave a charming rant on monolingual linguists while mentioning in that same way casual way that she spoke French and German. 

“Do you ever get to teach philosophy? I know it’s not a subject people usually learn in high school any more.” 

I realized I’d been staring at her, half enjoying just how pretty she was, half trying to figure out why she looked so strange. I took another sip of coffee and said, “Well, my high school’s pretty elite, so sometimes our principal lets me teach an elective. I did one on ethics last year—I thought it would be fun to try some of the experimental ethics questions on my class and see what answers they came up with, then discuss those answers in the context of what modern ethicists would say about the situations. It worked better than it had any right to. I can’t do that more often than every two or three years—calculus always comes first.” 

“Experimental ethics?” 

It was petty, but it felt good to learn that Iris wasn’t an expert on every field of philosophy. I reviewed it for her and gave some examples of the kind of dilemmas philosophers liked to pose to ordinary people—mostly college undergrads only a couple of years older than my high school students. She listened, her pose suggesting she was hanging on my every word, and asked an occasional thoughtful question. After I finished, she said, “One more question—you said modern ethicists. Why them?” 

“Oh. A lot of intro philosophy classes are taught more like the history of philosophy—you start with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and then proceed chronologically forward through philosophers and if you’re lucky, especially in a high school class, you might get to Hume and Kant. That’s fine, if you’re actually teaching a history of Western philosophy, but I don’t want to teach history, I want to teach _philosophy_. Have we really learned nothing in the last two thousand years? If we haven’t, why do we even bother with philosophy in the first place? It’s not just philosophy, either, we know so much more about cognitive psychology, sociology, biology, all these fields that touch on ethics, that Aristotle and Hume knew almost nothing about, and they took all kinds of prejudiced assumptions for granted too. The only ancient ethical theory that’s still relevant, though not for good reasons, is divine command theory, which no one should take seriously.” 

I looked up from my cup, realizing I could have put my foot in my mouth again—a surprising number of lesbians were Christian—but Iris nodded. “Of course it’s silly.” 

“Anyway, I focused on modern philosophers and sometimes mentioned their influences—Kant came up when we talked about Rawls, for instance. I used contemporary ethical examples. _I_ think it worked out, but of course I would.” 

She smirked. “Honestly, you could just replace Kant with Wittgenstein and no one would be able to tell, because no one can understand what they’re saying in the first place.” Something about the way she said it made me laugh and almost snort latte over everything. “You mentioned science earlier. I’m curious how you see the relationship between philosophy and science?” 

From there we discussed the relationships among epistemology, the philosophy of science, science itself, and mathematics. I knew much more about science and had actual research experience that informed my opinions on the topic, and Iris listened to me while offering some of her own thoughts on the topic. While she wasn’t much of a scientist, I was pleased to discover she was a scientific realist. 

I only realized when we wound down that it was past nine and I hadn’t had dinner. “I don’t suppose you’d want to catch a late dinner with me?” 

She shook her head and gave me a sad look. “I’m sorry, I can’t really eat at restaurants. Those allergies I mentioned.” 

“Oh. Did you—did you want to meet again?” 

She smiled brilliantly. “I’d love to.” 

After I stopped gaping, I pulled out my phone and we quickly exchanged phone numbers, emails, and permission to text each other. I staggered out of Jazzkat’s feeling a bit shocked. When I lurched through the door of our apartment with take-out in hand, Jess said, “I take it from the lateness of your arrival and the stupid-looking grin you’re wearing, it went well?” 

“Something like that.” I dumped myself into a chair next to the kitchen table and started pulling out food. 

“What’s she like?” 

I chewed, considering. “She’s a bit—awkward.” 

“You would know.” 

I ignored her. “Geeky, too, though in a good way. I don’t know if they’re related. Maybe she just doesn’t get out much because of her job.” 

“You liked her?” 

“I did. She’s smart and articulate.” And I loved listening to her voice. “She admires Quine, Putnam, and Russell, how could I not like her?” 

Jess snorted. “Only you would bring up that on a first date.” 

“She brought it up!” 

“There’s _another_ one? When are you renting the U-Haul?” 

I stuck up my middle finger and ate, refusing to indulge her anymore. 

I didn’t mention to Jess that while as long as I was talking with Iris, I could concentrate on the sound of her voice or on what she was saying, all the other times her impossible eyes and skin bugged me, tickling at the back of my mind like I ought to understand them. Had Jess noticed too? It seemed rude to discuss my date’s possible genetic disorder, so I didn’t. 

We met for our second date at the same cafe and ended up talking about our jobs. Iris seemed unwontedly interested in the workings of a modern high school, but she already knew calculus so there wasn’t much to explain about the meat of what I was teaching. I knew next to nothing about finance, though, and so I found Iris’s descriptions of what she did fascinating. She gave me a tour of what contemporary financial markets looked like, showing me how little my one long-ago high school class in economics had taught me, and introduced me to some of the underlying mathematics like the Black-Scholes model, though I didn’t have quite the background I needed to understand it. She spent the last hour or so teaching me about the efficient markets hypothesis and its problems. 

On our third date, after I’d gotten my coffee and Iris her water, I asked, “So, when I brought up divine command theory on our first date—I’ll just ask. Are you religious?” If I was cool, I’m sure I could have found an indirect way to ask that, but I never had been. 

She shook her head. “You?” 

“No.” 

“Were you raised religious?” 

I wasn’t sure what made her ask, but I said, “My family is Lutheran. It didn’t take. I kept attending church to please my parents until I went off to college, but by then I’d already stopped believing in Christianity. What about you?” 

She relaxed visibly, then looked away from me out the window, taking on that distant expression she got sometimes when I asked personal questions. “My parents were Episcopalians. I believed in God until I started to study philosophy in college. I was already doubting when I read Russell’s _Why I Am_ _Not a Christian_ , and after that I lost my faith.” 

I wouldn’t have said that the way she did—I didn’t lose anything, I learned something—but I wasn’t going to quibble. “Why do you ask?” 

Her eyes returned to mine. “It’s just easier. Don’t you think?” 

“Yes.” I felt like I’d missed something. “So three dates is enough to ask personal questions?” 

“Did you want to ask something?” When she wasn’t dazzling me with her knowledge or asking me about myself, Iris could be reticent. 

“How does a hedge fund manager end up in Portland? We’re not the world’s financial capital. We’re not even the financial capital of the west coast—SF is much more important, for the all the Silicon Valley venture capitalists if nothing else.” 

“Oh. I moved to Portland because I wanted to. One of the prerogatives of having enough money is that you can live where you want, or sometimes several places. I still have a house in New York, but I wanted a change of scenery. I like Portland’s weather.” She spoke without a hint of irony. 

I smiled, hoping I was reading her write. “I’ve never met anyone who likes Portland’s weather, at least not in the winter.” 

She grinned and raised an eyebrow. “Now you have! I like the rain. It’s soothing.” 

“You aren’t a native, are you?” 

“No.” 

“Where did you grow up?” 

“New York City, mostly. My parents sent me to boarding school once I was old enough. I went to Boston for college, then moved back home when I started working. Are you a native?” 

There was the crushing sense of inferiority again. I rotated my mug and drank, then confessed. “No. I grew up in a suburb of Indianapolis, public school all the way. I came to Portland to go to Reed College, and I just stayed for med school and my job.” 

“Tell me more.” 

We shared a long, tentative exploration of each others’s biographies. I learned about growing up as the only child of wealthy parents in New York, the kind of snobbish upper-class upbringing I could only imagine, and all-girls boarding schools. Her childhood sounded like a trip back in time. I taught her about growing up only one generation removed from hickdom, public schools, Indiana’s not-quite Midwest character, suburban car culture, and what it was like to have siblings. She didn’t mention what made her look so different or why she referred to her parents in the past tense, but I got the sense she was hiding more than only those two things. I couldn’t blame her, though, not when I was hiding so much myself. 

“Are we dating?” 

I had been staring into the dregs of my coffee, spacing out. She was watching me. “Hmmm?” 

“I want to know where I stand with you.” 

I took my hands off my cup. “I know some girls go in for long, detailed talks about relationship status, but I’m not one of them.” The moment her face went blank I regretted being so snippy. Why was I? Oh, right, mixed feelings. “What do you want from me?” 

“I’d like to see you more often than once a week. I want to be more than a woman you have coffee with. I want you to allow me to call you my girlfriend.” 

I’d never been good at negotiating this. “What does that mean to you? If you want exclusivity, you have it. I don’t date more than one woman at a time.” 

“I just want you to open up to me.” 

I took a deep breath and reached for her hands. She jerked, and I caught her sleeves instead. “When do you want to come over to my place?” 

“Tomorrow?” 

“Sure.” She rewarded me with one of her golden, glowing smiles. 

I was torn. On one hand, Iris was fascinating, whether she was explaining things I didn’t know or poking holes in things I thought I did. I’d never met anyone who focused so much on me, like I had every bit of her attention without anything held back, and she seemed ecstatic anytime I was in her presence and acted interested in what she had to say. She _wanted_ me, not to fuck me but just to be near me. Sometimes it was so palpable it was frightening. The rest of the time it was simply flattering. I didn’t know how to handle that much intensity, especially since my feelings about her seemed so much more complicated than hers about me and since she was so striking I sometimes didn’t know what to do or say around her. 

On the other hand, while I’d started to get used to Iris’s weirdness so it didn’t bother me the way it did when we first met, I still couldn’t help noticing things. I was almost certain that her eyes weren’t always the same shade of gold, that they changed color and not in response to the light I saw them in. I could invent explanations for that, variations in her diet having different amounts of some pigment precursor that led to changes in her eye color, but I was stretching. Being curious rather than disturbed was better, but it was still rude. It wasn’t her fault she made me feel strange, it was just something she _was_ , which left me feeling a lot of sympathy for her because I knew too much about what it was like to have people interested in my condition rather than me. 

I was confused why someone who was so smart, successful, and beautiful seemed so interested in me. I hoped it wasn’t because I was the only one who’d been able to make it to three dates without asking rude question about her disorder. I didn’t know what to make of at the same time being attracted to her and bothered by her differences, or how to handle not liking her as much as she liked me. I kept dating her because I’d had fun on our dates despite the awkwardness. 

I enjoyed having her over Saturday. I gave her a precis on bioethics and how much I disagreed with a lot of it, especially the parts that were barely-cloaked appeals to religion or squeamishness. We ended up perusing my book and DVD collection until she told me she hadn’t seen _But I’m a Cheerleader_ , so I made her watch that. She seemed to appreciate it, though I got the sense that having me sitting next to her on the couch was distracting for her. I lent her a book, and the next week went to pick it up at her house. 

Her house was north of Lake Oswego in Forest Heights, in a part of Portland that I couldn’t have afforded in a million years. The lot was absurd, and Douglas firs surrounded the house on all sides. You couldn’t even see her neighbors. I’d never seen Iris flaunt her money, she wore nice clothes and drove a new Volvo, not designer labels or a European super-luxury model. Her house, however, stank of cubic dollars. I suppressed a brief surge of jealousy, reminding myself that I’d made my choices and that I’d never wanted to do what Iris did to get her money, even if she’d started with a few more advantages than I’d had. 

The exterior was faux old-fashioned, the landscaping reminding me of the front of a country house in a British period drama. I would have guessed it was built in the real estate boom, though the trees had to have been there a good while. I didn’t suppress my curiosity once I got inside, though I tried not to look as impressed as I was. The interior had far more room than she needed, most of it converted into storage space filled with old furniture and the like. I made the mistake of asking where it all came from, and she said, “My family.” I didn’t ask again. In the rest of the house, she had enough books to fill a small library. After we sat down in the room that she obviously lived in most, I asked, “How did you find this place? I didn’t even think that anything like this existed in Portland.” 

“I found it, then offered the previous owners a great deal of money. It helped that I bought near the bottom of the trough in the real estate market, in 2010. It’s not ideal, but I couldn’t find anything I liked as much east of the Willamette whose owners were willing to sell. Zoning regs prevented me from building something like it, and trees take time to grow anyways.” 

“I’m also a bit surprised it’s so secluded. I thought you’d have a penthouse downtown since you grew up in New York.” 

She grinned. “There’s a reason I moved. Some people love New York City, but I wasn’t as in love with it.” 

After I’d finished interrogating her about her house, she brought me back to the main room, and said, “I was hoping to introduce you to one of my hobbies.” 

I took a spot on the couch next to her. “Which is?” 

“Jazz. Do you know anything about music?” 

“Next to nothing,” I said. “Never played an instrument in school or took any classes on it.” 

“I’ll keep it basic, then.” She picked up her computer, settled it into her lap, and hit a key. Music started playing—I didn’t recognize it, but then I didn’t even know what jazz sounded like. “This is swing. Hear the rhythm?” 

I didn’t. “I don’t even know what I’m listening for.” 

“Do you dance?” 

“Not really.” I paused, wanting to add something more so as not to sound completely uninterested. “This sounds vaguely familiar. I think some of my friends in college took classes dancing to something like this. Is that where you picked it up?” 

“Something like that. We’ll listen to a couple of more examples, then, and I’ll point out the notes for you.” She tapped out the rhythm for me on the case of her laptop, and slowly I started to hear what she was. “Swing makes the first note in that pair longer than the second. Dance music traditionally used a two-to-one ratio. Lots of musicians improvise, though, and there are many variations.” 

She was explaining about the origins of jazz and different stylistic influences going into it when I asked, “How did you learn all this, anyways?” 

“You know how a certain kind of parent pushes their kids to play the piano?” 

I made an oh of understanding. “And that’s where you learned music?” 

“My parents liked classical music. It was, well, teenaged rebellion that got me interested in jazz, but what I’d learned about music stuck.” 

“Why jazz? It seems a little obscure—or maybe I’m totally ignorant.” 

She thought for a moment, cocking her head. “There was a swing revival going on when I was in college, I took some dance classes in undergrad, and got curious about the music. The music was more interesting than the dances—who wants to dance with boys, anyways?” 

I smiled, and she went back to introducing me to recordings from throughout the history of the genre, and taught me who she liked—Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Machito Bauza and the Afro-Cubans, Chano Pozo, the Miles Davis Quintet, John Coltrane, Horace Silver, Joanne Brackeen, Jessica Williams, Wynton Marsalis, and others, lots of others. She explained the differences between subgenres, but a lot of the finer distinctions were lost on me. Occasionally, she’d slip into music-theorist mode and I’d have to ask, “What?” a lot to make out what she meant. I still thought her job was more interesting than her hobby, but by the end of day, I’d learned to respect it, if not like it. 

After that weekend, we started spending more time together, one or two nights a week and weekends when I could get free, scheduling between my grading and class prep and Iris’s periodic flights to New York. We ended up spending more time at my place than at hers because driving back late at night didn’t bother her. She offered companionable silence even on some nights when I had work to do, something I really appreciated. She even took care of me when I was sick for three days with an upper respiratory infection that left me all but incapacitated. Iris’s food allergies made finding places to go out a little challenging, but we persevered with lectures, book signings, plays, and jazz performances, when she could persuade me, and when we had time, trips to the beach. Iris paid for everything when we went out together, and as much it made me squirm, I liked that. 

In all this time, Iris never made a move on me, never kissed me, never so much as even touched my skin, confining herself to gentle hugs and strokes on my shoulders, arms, and hips, always through my clothes. I considered whether she might be asexual, only I’d caught her looking on a few occasions and didn’t think she would if she were really that. I know she noticed when I looked. I didn’t mind waiting because it deferred the conversation I didn’t want to have with her, the one where I was afraid she’d look away from me, trying to hide that slight twist of her mouth, and explain that it wasn’t _me_ while saying that she couldn’t bear to touch me. That’s how it had gone with the last woman I’d really liked. I wondered if Iris was thinking the same thing, about her condition. 

Iris was different. Her skin always looked bloodless, except for those shadows under her eyes, and I couldn’t understand how she could have blood visible only in the veins under her eyes but nowhere else. She never went out in the sun, which made sense given her apparent lack of melanin, but what kind of albinism would affect her skin but not her normally-pigmented hair, not to mention give her golden, color-changing eyes? By this point I was sure that she wasn’t dyeing her hair or wearing contacts. I became convinced that her beauty and her gracefulness had something to do with it, too. 

In early December, I started having a harder time interpreting her differences as anything in my experience at all. She never went to the bathroom in my presence no matter how much water she drank or how long we were out. While she complained about getting wet as much as anyone, she never said anything about feeling hot or cold, and she took cues whether to wear her jacket from me. I thought this was just a personal quirk until one unusually cold winter evening I breathed on my hands to warm them, watched the faint blurring, and noticed that Iris’s breath didn’t fog the air at all. I shivered and put it down to the cold when she asked, but I hadn’t shivered because of the temperature. That was the first time that I’d felt as strange as on the night we’d met. In that moment, I couldn’t shake the uncanny valley feeling that Iris _looked_ human but wasn’t.


	2. Chapter 2

Other moments weren’t like that, but they were still strange. On one of the rare nights I cooked, since Jess was so much better at it, I cut my finger while chopping celery and, while swearing and finding my first-aid kit, I looked at Iris and saw she’d gone still. Too still, I realized, because she wasn’t even breathing. She raced out the front door of my and Jess’s apartment into the cold, and after I’d washed and bandaged my cut, I followed her. “What was _that_?” 

“I’m squeamish. I freak out around blood.” 

I looked down. It was a pretty good slice, all the way across my middle finger, but it wasn’t that bad. “You must be kidding. It didn’t even bleed that much.” 

“I’m serious. I admire you for surviving medical school. I couldn’t handle it.” She seemed genuinely shaken, verging on terrified, and her demeanor more than her words convinced me she was telling the truth. 

“Okay.” She hadn’t mentioned holding her breath. 

“I think I’m going to go home. I’m sorry blood bothers me so much.” She was already gone when I started to say she’d forgotten her laptop. When she picked it up the next day, she seemed like herself again, and I was too embarrassed to ask about it. 

What was going on with Iris? I could almost believe her excuse for her reaction to my cut, but nothing could explain breath that didn’t condense in the cold. It was impossible. Other things weren’t consistent with what I knew about genetic disorders, either. While many genetic disorders caused a distinctive appearance, none that I knew of or found in the literature ever made people _pretty_. It didn’t make sense, either, since human perceptions of attractiveness were probably selected partly to detect genetic disorders. A genetic disorder could explain her skin, her strange food allergies, maybe her eyes, maybe her beauty, and maybe her agility, but it couldn’t account for a body temperature as low as a cold winter night in Portland, so low she couldn’t touch me for fear I’d notice. 

Even arctic mammals couldn’t remove enough moisture from their breath so it didn’t produce condensation. She couldn’t be cold-blooded like a snake, either, because their metabolisms slowed down while she didn’t seem any more or less energetic no matter the ambient temperature. Iris was outside known biology. What was she? Cyborgs, robots, aliens, zombies, and vampires all came to mind. I felt ridiculous for entertaining those thoughts, but I _knew_ what I’d seen and it fit too well with how she always kept an insulating layer of cloth between us. I remembered the words from the Sherlock Holmes story: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” I didn’t really believe she was any of those, but the truth had to be something bizarre. After considering even wilder ideas, I decided I didn’t have enough evidence to narrow down the possibilities any further. I also thought about trying to study her, but I couldn’t think of any methods indirect enough that they wouldn’t be obvious to her. 

Right after meeting Iris, I’d looked up her unusual characteristics on the Internet. Hoping that other people’s minds worked the same as mine did, I opened Google Trends and examined as many search terms that might describe Iris’s features as I could think of. If Iris wasn’t unique, if there were other people like her wandering other cities, the right place to look wasn’t the news media but the parts of the web where people talked to each other. It didn’t take me long to find patterns. The same cities kept coming up: Jacksonville, Florida; some place I’d never heard of called Forks in Washington state; Montreal, Quebec; and more, places outside North America. Searches went back as long as Google had data, but there was a definite increase in the last ten years, especially in those places but everywhere else, too. Playing around with regional restrictions revealed periodic variations in searches in particular places, a cycle more than a year in duration. I didn’t know what to make of that. 

Their internationalism told me they probably weren’t associated with a government or governments, because I couldn’t see any common interests that would connect India, Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Brazil, among others. I didn’t see how I could narrow it further based on the information from Trends so I started digging into discussions on Twitter, blogs, and fora. Everyone I found fell into two categories, curious bystanders who’d noticed people who looked like Iris and asked about them on the Internet, and conspiracy theorists who were happy to supply wild conjectures without any evidence backing them up. Whatever the secret was, so far they’d managed to keep it off the Internet. 

After we got back from our next date, I asked, “Iris, what are you?” 

Her face went blank. “What do you mean, ‘what am I?’ I am or was a philosopher, I’m a hedge fund manager, I’m a lesbian—what are you getting at?” 

“You know what I’m getting at. You’re different.” 

She shook her head. I stopped pressing her. She didn’t have any intention of telling me, I didn’t want to hear her lie, and I wasn’t even sure that forcing her to tell me her secret was the right thing to do. 

I couldn’t leave it alone, though, and I had an idea on how to make progress, but between writing and grading finals, sending college recommendation letters, and attending Christmas events, I didn’t have any more time to give to it in December. Before the real crunch started, I told Iris I wouldn’t have much time to spend with her, either, and that I was going to Indiana for Christmas. “Three months seems a little premature to bring you to meet my parents. I’d say I’m sorry, but trust me, meeting them isn’t much of a privilege.” Aside from the endless potential for awkward conversations and questions, I didn’t know how they’d react to my bringing a woman home in the first place, and they’d probably say enough about my past that Iris would figure things out, even if I specifically told them not to. 

“You don’t get along? Because you’re gay?” 

“Good guess. It’s part of the problem. I’m just not the child my parents wanted.” I’m not male. “I’m not a successful doctor, I’m an atheist, a lesbian, and a high school teacher. My parents had these dreams for me, I systematically crushed them, and they’ve never adjusted. It makes things tense. Are you doing anything for Christmas, Iris?” 

“No.” She sounded disappointed. I wondered what it was about her that always made me say the wrong thing. “I’ll see you when you get back.” She smiled, making my breath catch. 

Seeing my family was as awkward as always. My parents “assumed” I’d be going to church with them on Christmas day just to make me refuse again. At dinner two days after Christmas, I told everyone I had a girlfriend. They responded with deafening silence. Even the pair of cute earrings my mother gave me didn’t make up for the rest of the visit. When Iris picked me up at the airport, my first words were, “I’m glad to be back.” As weird as time with her could get, Iris never deliberately made me feel awkward like my family did. 

I’d focused my research on Iris’s secret on North America because I knew it best and on Forks in particular because it was closest. While scouring local news for anything that seemed out-of-place, I found mentions of a spa that had opened on the outskirts of town right around the time that sightings of the Iris-like people became more common. As Forks’s main industry was its two prisons and most of the businesses that catered to tourists were related to outdoorsy stuff, sport fishing and exploring Olympic National Park, it seemed like an odd place for a spa too expensive for the locals to afford. As a cover story for a secret research facility or something of that nature, though, it fit, and and an accidentally-public Facebook discussion on how the Iris-like people seemed to be associated with it clinched that. I bought a burner, called it, and asked for an appointment. I was afraid they’d demand money up front, but instead the unwelcoming employee on the other end told me they were booked for the year and that when they started taking appointments for the next year, they’d call me back. Not to my surprise, they didn’t. 

Google Trends had showed that the periodic increase in the activity associated with whatever was going on was coming to Forks in February, which was why I begged Jess to come with me and help me drive there the first weekend of the month. I summarized my reasoning for her over dinner on Friday night and waited for her incredulity to wear off. She said, “You make that sound almost plausible, except it’s still crazy. Iris is _what_?” 

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out.” 

“But you don’t think she’s human.” 

I made a noncomittal noise. “That depends on what you mean by ‘human.’ I wouldn’t go that far, but she has some definite metabolic differences from the rest of us that I don’t know how to explain.” 

“And you’re what, going to go ask these people what they are?” 

“I just want to take a look and see if there are any clues. I don’t intend to confront anyone.” 

“Well, I still think you’re nuts, but if you need someone to help you drive, you can owe me one. Please tell me you told some people what to do if you disappear?” 

“Yeah.” 

On the way to Forks, I explained about the mysterious spa. After I’d finished, Jess gave me that sideways you’re-crazy look and said, “What are you hoping to find?” 

“ _Hoping_? I’m hoping to find something, anything, that won’t require me relearning the laws of physics to accommodate the existence of my girlfriend. I’m hoping to find a clinic for insert-rare-genetic-disease-here that I’ve never heard of, so I can go home and apologize to Iris.” 

Jess sat up. “But you really don’t expect to find that. What do you expect to find?” 

“I haven’t the faintest idea.” 

We switched places at a McDonald’s so I could drive. Jess waited until we were back on the road to ask the question I knew had been eating at her. “In all this time you haven’t said one word about the woman herself. I assume that since we’re driving a couple of hundred miles on a wild goose chase, there’s something there.” 

I breathed out air. “I wish I knew what it was.” 

Jess snorted. “Tell me something.” 

I waited until I could put on cruise control and relax my foot. “When I’m with her, sometimes I can’t think and forget to breathe because she’s that gorgeous. Other times, not as often but it still happens, she makes my skin crawl. She’s much more into me than I am into her. She’s been trying to make me like her, as hard as she can, ever since we first met. I’ve never been chased like that by anyone. I don’t understand, either. Why me? Okay, I’m smart, we have some interests in common, neither of us really wants to talk about our pasts or jump into bed. I can see why she doesn’t care that I’m barely self-supporting, I’m sure she could afford a housewife, but what else have I got? It’s not my social graces and certainly not my looks. Portland is not lacking smart, educated, underemployed lesbians, and she’s a catch by any standards, brilliant, rich, and beyond beautiful. I don’t get it. And I have no idea how I feel about her because my feelings are so contradictory and confusing.” I took my eyes off the road to glance over at Jess. “I don’t have any idea what to do.” 

“I’m not dumb enough to give advice. You’ll have to sort this out on your own.” 

We made tense small talk the rest of the way to Forks and went silent on our way out of town to the supposed spa. It had the blocky shape and spartan exterior of an office park or government building, with no adornment to soften it and low-maintenance landscaping. The lack projected indifference, as if to tell people to stay away. The windows were mirrored and tinted dark, making it impossible to see inside, reminding me I’d never seen Iris in the sun. Since I knew it was a front, none of this surprised me. Only the pricey cars parked in front looked normal, suggesting the kind of wealthy clientele I’d expect at an exclusive spa, and I wondered if everyone like Iris had money. There wasn’t anywhere else to park, so I pulled into their parking lot and stopped. Jess said, “What now?” 

“We take a look around.” I sounded more confident than I felt. 

Jess chased after me, a few reluctant steps behind, as I circled the parking lot, inspecting the front of the building. The glass doors were as opaque as the windows. Looking more closely at the building’s material, I got that itching something’s-not-right feeling that bothered me around Iris sometimes. I stopped next to the door, at a position where they wouldn’t be able to see me inside, and tapped the stone with a fingernail. “How’d they build this? It’s a melange of different rock types, probably glacial deposits, stuck together without mortar or”—I pried at one of the joins—“gaps. And they’re all irregularly shaped, too. It reminds me of Incan architecture, only I know people online mentioned it went up almost overnight. They would have had to grind the rocks down to fit them together like this, and even with modern tools that would take awhile. How?” 

“Don’t look at me. I climb rocks, I don’t study them.” 

I wasn’t getting anywhere, only further confirming my suspicions that something weird was going on. I stepped in front of the doors. “In for a penny, in for a pound.” 

“Are you sure that’s a good—” 

I pushed one open and held my breath in surprise. The receptionist stood, without any chair, her golden eyes the exact same shade as Iris’s, her bloodless pale skin different only because of its faint olive tinge. Only her black braided hair made her coloring distinct. She also shared Iris’s jaw-dropping beauty. “May I help you?” she said, with disinterest. 

Without any plants, wall decorations, or furniture, the front office inside didn’t look like it belonged in a spa any more than the outside. “We think we’re lost. We’re trying to find a place to eat in Forks but took a wrong turn. Could you tell us how to get back into town?” 

She directed us in that same monotone, and we turned to go. Right outside the door, Jess leaned over to me. “Okay, I believe you now. She looked just like Iris. What _are_ they?” 

I shrugged, disappointed that I hadn’t found anything, only confirmation of what I already knew. I heard the door open and then slam behind us, caught a blur in my peripheral vision, and saw the receptionist blocking the way to our car. “We need to talk.” 

I froze. She grabbed our arms, Jess shrieked, and I shivered as the woman’s hand chilled me. The churning in my stomach grabbed most of my attention, but a small part of me noticed that I was right about their body temperature as she pushed my sweater up to secure her grip. She dragged us inside with irresistible force, carrying our weight with ease, and hauled us through corridors past offices into a large room filled with other pale people. 

A teenaged girl with a brown bob and a crown—a crown—said, “Santiago, who are these people, and why are you manhandling them?” She was not very tall, not physically imposing, but from the crown and the way everyone looked to her when she spoke, she was in charge. They, whatever they were, were all gorgeous, and she was no exception, even not quite fully grown. 

“They know, Your Imperial Majesty,” the receptionist—no, the guard—replied. She sounded defensive, and when she bowed—bowed!—it was stiff. 

“They know?” She glanced to a boy about her age standing next to her who also wore a crown. He had russet hair and was a few inches taller than she was. “Edward?” 

He looked at us. Nothing happened. I tried to think past the paralyzing terror and find a threat or a bribe that would make them let us go. He frowned. “She recognizes that we’re different, but not what we are.” I shivered, chills like fingernails on a blackboard crawling down my spine. How did he know that? 

“Santiago, they’re terrified—you don’t need to hold them like that.” She looked to us. “We’re not going to hurt you.” 

Our captor let us go. Jess stood crouched, knees locked, fists clenched. I blacked out for a moment in sheer terror and woke up woozy on my hands and knees. I’d fallen on my left arm and left a good—stinging—gouge in it where my bracelet had cut into my skin. A collection of golden-eyed gazes flicked to us as I trembled on the floor. I rolled back hard onto my hip bones, trying to breathe and work my bracelet loose from the gash. I looked up, stared back into their eyes, and saw they weren’t watching me, they were watching my arm and my blood-smeared bracelet. I realized I’d made a mistake, that when I’d cut myself cooking Iris had run out not because blood disgusted her but because it attracted her. Pale, cold, attracted to blood, never seen in the sun. I recalled one of my impossible conjectures: vampire. 

The boy said, “ _Now_ the one on the left knows.” 

They had all gone impossibly still the moment I started bleeding. The crowned girl said, “Everyone out!” even as she picked us up and moved us away from the door. In a quick flowing motion they exited while she turned to us and said, “ _Please_ stay here. I’ll send someone with bandages, and she’ll explain everything.” Then she left with the rest of them. 

I was shaking harder. Jess knelt next to me and hugged me, which helped me control myself. She said, “What the _fuck_ just happened?” 

“They’re vampires.” 

She inspected me, her expression intent and critical. “You’re serious.” 

“I don’t know what I mean, exactly. I mean, vampires are entirely, I mean I thought they were entirely fictional, so the question is _which_ kind of vampire do I mean when I say ‘vampire.’ I don’t know but I think that these vampires are the original source of the stories about vampires and—” 

She hugged me tighter. “Don’t lose it on me. Should we run?” 

“I don’t think it would be a good idea. They seem to be afraid of losing control around blood. Iris was too. That’s not consistent with them wanting to eat us now. They could still be planning to eat us later, but not necessarily.” 

She looked me over. “Okay, we stay, for the moment.” 

It was no more than a couple of minutes before a girl came in who looked about the same age as the crowned teenagers, with russet hair the same color as the boy’s; she was trailed by two tall, ripped Native Americans. She was also too pale and too pretty, if not as much as the vampires, though her eyes were a normal soft brown. I said, “What are you?” 

“I’m a half-vampire.” Her tone was careful, soothing, like she was speaking to a mental patient on the verge of going berserk. She held out a first-aid kit and a bottle of water. “Here. Do you want me to bandage that for you?” 

Jess took the kit. “I’ll do it.” She turned my wrist over, washed the cut with water, spread some antibiotic ointment over it, applied a gauze pad, and wound tape around my arm. I hadn’t hurt myself that much, about as much as if I’d barked a knee, but on top of my initial terror and learning about vampires, wrist injuries brought up bad memories. 

When Jess was finished, the girl said, “I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself first. I’m Elspeth. You probably have questions. I promise I’ll answer all of them, but do you mind if I ask you a few things first? This is not the way things are supposed to go,” she gestured at me and Jess, “and we’d like to know if there’s anything we have to do immediately to fix things.” 

Jess said, “What are you going to do to us?” 

“We aren’t going to hurt you!” When she said it, there was something that made me think it was true, which was more than a little disconcerting because I had no real reason to believe her. There was something wrong about it, just like when the boy knew what I was thinking. “We won’t stop you from leaving or prevent you from telling anyone you want about us. If you want, you can walk out of here now, but we’d like an opportunity to persuade you to keep our secret. Please?” 

Jess and I exchanged glances. She answered for both of us. “Okay.” 

“I don’t want to be rude but—who are you? How did you learn about us and know to come here?” 

After we’d introduced ourselves, I started. “It’s kind of a long story. Last fall, I met a—a vampire, named Iris Langley.” I explained briefly my relationship with Iris, trying not to share too much detail, to make it sound like we were just friends, while also trying not to think about what dating a vampire meant, then the chain of reasoning that had led me to Forks. 

After I finished, she asked, “So, Iris _didn’t_ tell you about us?” 

I shook my head. “I asked her point-blank, once, but she stonewalled me.” 

She thought about that. Jess broke in. “Why don’t you have any chairs here? Is there anywhere we could sit that isn’t as hard as this floor?” 

“Vampires don’t need chairs. We’d hoped to avoid moving you until Meg stopped bleeding. You aren’t quite clotted yet, so the smell’s still strong.” She turned to one of the Native Americans. “Jacob, could you find some chairs for them?” He disappeared out the door as she looked back to us. “It hurts for them, being around human blood without drinking it. Also, not all vampires have perfect control around human blood, there’s at least one circumstance where even vampires with perfect control would be tested, and we want to avoid putting you at risk.” 

Jess said, “That’s not very reassuring.” 

“We evacuated everyone who might have trouble from this part of the building.” 

That did make me feel better. I said, “Can I ask questions now?” 

“You can. I could also try to explain, or I could magically impart a summary of what you’ll want to know, which will also explain how I can do that, or some combination of the three.” Her tone sounded rote, as if she’d said it before. 

“What?” She didn’t respond. I forced myself to think, to put together those queasy moments when he’d been able to tell the instant I figured out they were vampires, when she’d sounded so honest and forthright I trusted her. Telepathy, magic telepathy, she’d just said as much. “I don’t really want to have my mind tampered with any more today than it already has been, so let’s stick with the _normal_ alternatives, okay?” 

That seemed to catch her off-guard, and Jess also turned to me. “Tampered with?” 

“You—” I tried to find a way of describing it that didn’t sound ridiculous. “I believe what you say, even though I don’t have any reason to.” 

Elspeth cocked her head. “I have magic that makes it obvious when I tell the truth. That’s what you noticed. If I tried to lie, that would be obvious too.” She paused. “My hair is black.” She was right, that didn’t have the impact her other words did. 

Only, how did I know her power was involuntary, that she couldn’t use it to make whatever she said seem true or false irrespective of whether it was or wasn’t? She couldn’t prove it to me, not directly. It was the problem of induction again. She could tell me a million things pretending her power was involuntary, saving it for a crucial deception on the millionth-and-first. I had to think about it scientifically, look for corroborative evidence, check her power against what I already knew. Elspeth had believed her demonstration meant something, otherwise she wouldn’t have bothered. Maybe she was telling the truth and hadn’t seen the other possible interpretation. “Your power is telepathy, with an active component—the magical summary—and a passive component, which makes you seem honest when you’re telling the truth? That’s what we’re talking about, right? You can influence my mind.” 

“Specifically, I can send sense impressions, memories, thoughts—the magical summaries are one application. It also helps me pick the right words to be understood. There’s more to it, but that’s the essence of it.” 

“Please tell me that it only works on true relative to what you believe.” 

Elsepth smiled. “And a little bit depending on what the person I’m communicating with believes, yes.” 

“The crowned boy from earlier. He read my mind—that’s how he knew when I figured out you were vampires. Are you all telepaths?” 

“Edward. Yes, he can read minds. No, not all of us can. I can’t. I can only send, he can only receive. Let me give you a basic—normal—summary, then you can ask questions?” I nodded. Jacob returned with charcoal-gray roller chairs, and Jess and I both sat. “There are vampires. We collectively refer to people with some human and some vampire ancestry, like me, as hybrids. Jacob and Aaron,” she indicated her followers, “are werewolves. We call people with powers, also like me, witches. Vampires, hybrids, and humans can be witches, but wolves can’t…”


End file.
